The Netherlands turns orange again, the colour of the Dutch Team. After 32 years, Oranje plays the World Cup final tonight.

A good moment to write a Silly Sunday post, with some silly and some less silly topics.

Lets begin with the serious ones.

It seems that not all African countries love football.

The al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab has banned playing soccer in Somalia. It prohibits broadcasts of the World Cup, describing the sport as “a satanic act” that corrupts Muslims. They threaten Somali soccer players and anyone who has challenged their extreme views. Worse, in the past month, they have killed at least five people for watching the World Cup.Read more at the Washington Postand at NU.nl (NL)

Despite concerns about South Africa‘s ability to host the World Cup, so far the tournament has gone off without any major incidents. The major hiccups concerned transport.

Social Media and Football don’t seem to go hand-in-hand. Mashable reports that besides alcohol and sex, coaches increasingly institute ad hoc bans on social media sites. “So far, players on the teams from Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Holland, Germany, Argentina and England are forbidden to use social services such as Twitter.”

As a link to the humorous part, Dutch can read this column of Youp van het Hek in the NRC about Budler (and more).

Animals
Many Brazilians disliking Brazil’s leading sports announcer, Galvão Bueno, twittered “Cala Boca Galvão.”, which means “shut up Galvão”. It became a trending topic on Twitter and tweople start asking what it meant. Someone made up it meant “Help us save the Galvão birds”. In fact “gavião,” (hawk) resembles Galvão. Websites and videos were made to substantiate this. The Brazilian author Paulo Coelho wrote on Twitter: “CALA BOCA GALVÃO is the Brazilian version of a homeopathic remedySILENTIUM GALVANUS.” (sources: NY Times and Joop.nl [nl]). So indirectly animal lovers and animal rights activists helped to spread the word like parrots… A brilliant practical joke.

Speaking about homeopathy, the Octopus Paul who has accurately predicted all knock-out matches till now seems to be an example of a placebo-effect: believing in a certain outcome helps to establish this. People take it very seriously, and threatened to use the octopus as an ingredient in a meal. Not paella, because the octopus has favored Spain as the Winner. However, I seriously doubt the experimental settings, as one of the boxes the octopus can choose from is always closer to the octopus than the other, and he always seems to choose the closest (possibly he is not psychic, but intelligent). Furthermore, the experimenters were not blinded to the outcome and neither was the octopus.
By the way the Octopus has competition of an exotic bird, an Aardvark, a chimpanzee and others who all have predicted another outcome of the Final, namely the victory of the Dutch!! However, some have accused the animals of orange bias.
Anyway in support of the Dutch I have changed my avatar on Twitter (right).

By the way I was completely fooled earlier this week by a hoax of the journal the Telegraaf who showed this picture:

Here is an updated results scheme for the world cup brand war. Since the brands do supply the goods to enhance natural talent and performance, this may be another way of predicting the outcome. Alas (again), the Dutch are sponsored by Nike, and the Spanish by Adidas. Adidas has won almost all matches till now (except against Holland once) (source: Freshnessmag.com).